Thursday, August 19, 2004
By DANIEL SNEIDER
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
HANOI, Vietnam -- A conversation with Ton Nu Thi Ninh is a disarming experience.
Dressed in traditional Vietnamese dress, an embroidered blue ao dai, Madame Ninh exudes elegance. She speaks the King's English. Her French, I am told, is even better. Whatever language she is speaking, Ninh delivers trenchant thoughts with eloquent frankness.
This makes Ninh an unlikely, but highly effective, spokesperson for Vietnam. A longtime communist who worked for two decades in the foreign ministry, she now occupies a seat in the country's parliament, the National Assembly. She serves as vice-chair of the assembly's foreign relations committee, a post that frequently takes her to Europe and the United States.
Ninh has a well-deserved reputation for explaining Vietnam's policies -- defending them while also being able to admit mistakes -- without the stiff language of communist officials. That confidence, she explained as we talked at length in the National Assembly building in Hanoi, comes from an unusual history.
Ninh was born in 1947 into Vietnam's former royal family in the old Imperial capital of Hue. Her grandfather was a high mandarin, a court official, who served as a regent to the throne.
Her father studied in Paris during the days of French rule. In 1950 he took his family back to France for 10 years. After brief stint in the embassy of South Vietnam, he opened one of the first Vietnamese restaurants in Paris.
The family returned home to South Vietnam but Ninh later followed her brothers back to France to study at the elite University of Paris, the Sorbonne. Her education included a spell at Cambridge University where she wrote a thesis on the American writer William Faulkner. Those were the revolutionary days of the late '60s, and Ninh was swept up into the ranks of the National Liberation Front, the communist-controlled movement in the South.
"The choices were very easy then," she recalled. "We had to do something to get the Americans out of Vietnam and reunify the country."
English teacher
Ninh returned to Saigon in 1972 and worked secretly for the NLF while teaching English at Saigon University. Others in her family took a much different path -- her older brother was in the South Vietnamese army and was sent to a re-education camp after the war.
Ninh, however, emerged as a star after the communist victory. She was invited north to become a diplomat.
Two years ago, Ninh was elected -- though there is no real contest for these seats -- to the National Assembly. She advocates deepening Vietnam's ties to the world economy, including bringing in foreign investors. Ninh takes unmistakable aim at more conservative elements of the communist leadership who fear more rapid moves toward a market economy.
"There is no real security if it rests on an economy that is weak," Ninh says. "You cannot say, in the name of security, close the doors. The question is the pace at which you open those doors."
Ninh has also been a strong proponent of closer ties with the United States. She enthusiastically encourages the flow of Vietnamese students to American universities and recalls being squired around the Congress by former POW, Sen. John McCain.
But she also relishes trading barbs with U.S. officials. With characteristic bluntness, she talks disdainfully of her encounter with a senior Bush official who upon meeting her launched into wagging his finger at Vietnam's refusal to back the war in Iraq. He warned her as well about friendship with North Korea, a strange charge given a very cool relationship with Pyongyang. South Korea is the main player here, particularly as an investor.
"I thought I was back in the 1980s," Ninh said. "He was governed by ideology. He didn't do any research into the subtleties. For him, it is a black-and-white world."
Perhaps Madame Ninh will be foreign minister some day, I suggested. No, she responded with a laugh -- political reality will not allow it. Too bad. Vietnam would be hard pressed to find a more impressive representative.
X Daniel Sneider is foreign affairs columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.